Tag Archives: Bayonetta 2

Grand Theft Auto V’s PC edition and Mortal Kombat X has both launched and for the both of them I wish their launches the best of luck and I will hopefully pick up GTA V PC later, when it is featured in one of steam’s famous seasonal sale sessions and once I build a better computer that can handle Rockstar Game’s newest game at 1080p resolution at 60 frames per seconds.

Since their first editions of GTA and Mortal Kombat both game series has received their fair share controversies over the years. From claims from promoting and encouraging violent activity and negatively impacting how the player view and interact with reality to being too gruesome for the players.

In the past few months and recent years we have seen a push to try to make the videogame world more grown – up and artistic, tackling social and economical issues of the real world and society and a noticeable push back against the violent games and games with sex appeal. The news stories that came out around the time of MKX, GTA V, Hotline Miami II and Bayonetta comes to mind.

Despite the fact that several scientific studies have found that playing violent or high sex appeal videogames does NOTmake the players more aggressive or sexists, we still come back to this conversation with every new mature game.

At this time I just want to take this time to congratulate and applaud all these mature games, From first person games taking place in setting that mimics the conflicts that are taking place in other corners of the world, to fantasy games with questionable story lines or themes, and games with an unnecessary blood and depiction of violence.

Thank you to Rockstar for making a sandbox game where you can commit felonies in detail, thank you to Platinum Star for creating a female character who is confident enough and has achieved Self-Actualization to fight demons from the deepest corners of hell while confidently showing off the assets she has, and thank you to the people behind Hotline Miami 2 for having just the right amount of too much violence and blood.

Thank you to the game developers for making all these hyper violent and hyper sexualized games for us to enjoy and more importantly making the decision to make their games even within this gaming political environment. I respect the self confidence in a game that realize their main selling points might not be for everyone, or might get blowback from some people, and then going ahead and advertising it anyways.

Being mature means doing what you want, choosing to be violent as you want but realizing that there will are challenges that you will have to face, taking responsibility, and deciding if it worth it to go ahead and do what you want anyways. Not every mature, or any game needs to face important contemporary issues (or have them in there in the first place) and these games knows what sometime people just want a videogame to have fun by performing ridiculous over the top acts of violence that either, like the case of Mortal Kombat, physically could not perform or, like in GTA V, could not commit and still carry on with their normal non-felony life.

This month Nintendo had decided to release a series of promotional art work of Nintendo’s take on the iconic Rosie the Riveter World War II posters with some of their leading ladies from their popular games. These posters stars: Rosalina, Nintendo’s newest princess, Princess Zelda’s alter ego, Tetra, from their incredibly popular (and just recently released in HD) “Legend of Zelda Wind Waker game”, Samus Aran, one of the first female protagonist of the 8 bit era from the “Metroid” series, and Platinum Star’s own, and recent to the Nintendo family, Bayonetta from “Bayonetta 1 & 2”.

Samus is akin to Wonder Woman of the video game world. A independent woman that has been around since the beginning of the console lifespan and a trend setter in her own right.

The author comments on the lack of Princess Peach representation in these promotional posters, and I agree with her idea that Nintendo might have chosen not to go toward with her as one of the stars because of how often the Mushroom princess has been kidnapped in all of the Mario games.

The author does takes issue of how Tetra is kidnapped by Ganondorf and must be rescued by the hero of time, you, and once the plot reveals how this leader of a pirate gang is actually the reincarnation of the princess of Hyrule and wielder of the Triforce segment of Wisdom. She is prevented from leaving the underwater -and protected- Hyrule Castle, until Link rebuilds his missing piece of the triforce lest Ganondorf recaptures her and assemble the entire Triforce and gets his one wish of returning the land of Hyrule to it’s original state, destroying all the land and inhabitants that lives above the sea.

Then the author goes on and talks about how Bombette, from Paper Mario, and Toadette are “just pink versions of the male characters” forgetting that they are not pink characters of male characters but pink characters of their entire species.

Toadette’s biggest characteristic is because she a girl because she, and all other toads, has no personalities . If I was to put on MY over thinking cap I would argue that the toads have no personalities because they are all no-name proletariats, there to only serve Princess Peach, the only member of the Bourgeois in the Mushroom kingdom

The author also mentions how ‘problematic’ Bayonetta, a character that has passed the Bechdel Test, is for having an uncomfortable levels sex appeal in her game. As someone who played through both of the Bayonetta games just last year, Bayonetta has always come across as someone is determined in her mission, never to be distracted by anything petty like men or shoes. She is sexy not because it is bad character aspect of her personality, but because she is so much in control of anything that heaven or Hell could throw at her that her sex appeal has become a luxury, using it to taunt her friends and foes.

Bayonetta is so confident about herself she has achieved Self-actualization in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. She has reached her full potential, she is pursuing it, and she does not care any anyone else thinks of her. She is having fun

The author of this Huffington Post closes with mentioning games with more powerful women characters, like Naughty Dog’s “Last of Us” and Ubisoft’s “Beyond Good and Evil” as a few other non-Nintendo games that have done women characters the right way.

From my own point of view, as a reader of the post and as an avid videogame player, this post smacks of looking a gift horse in the mouth. Out of all the video game companies out there, from Sony to Microsoft and Steam, Nintendo is the only one going out there and putting themselves on the line to celebrate women in the media. I do not see any other companies going out of their way to plan, make, and execute a promotional event for Women’s History month, but after the blow back from Nintendo I have an educated guess on why they might want to abstain from talking or mentioning politics with their female characters.

Evolve, the newest AAA game just hit the shelves, and from the marketing and gameplay it looks like Evolve might be the biggest game of 2015, in terms of new IP. This looked like a cool game, something that I would be interested in playing with other people, either as hunting down a monster in a pack or hunting the hunters themselves. But I, as many other people have said before, the DLC built into the game and that are all available for Day One purchasing have made me very cautious for in buying anything for the game.

The game looks cool by not only just the game’s concept of a monster hunt but by looking at the resume of the game developers behind the game

The base game is priced at $60, but if you preordered the game you get a fifth playable monster, there is a current DLC pack that promises four more playable human characters, ten cosmetic monster and hunter skins (all priced between 5-7 USD a pop) and the promise of more DLC later down the line. One of my reservation about this game is how much content I will be missing if I just bought the base game later once there is a decent sale of it on Steam.

It is a new game of a fresh IP, why would I have any trust in the game to justify spending even more money than the sixty dollar price tag

So far it is established that if I buy the base game right now I will be missing out on one giant monster and four hunters. Because of that all DLC gated content that might favor those who are willing to spend more money, especially since this a strong PvP game where the DLC content would directly affect my potential matches.

Maybe I am just spoiled by the recent Nintendo games I have been playing. Besides Bayonetta 2 and Super Smash Bros I have also played through Platinum Star’s other Wii U game, The Wonderful 101. All of those Nintendo games that I mentioned had more than enough content within the base game, a 12-20+ hour story campaign for Bayonetta and The Wonderful 101, numerous in game unlockables across the board and plenty of replay value. All for the base price of 30 and 60 USD.

This game offers such a good story and so much content that it doesn’t feel right that it was bought for $30

While Smash has confirmed DLC, in the form of Mewtwo being a playable character but I am not raising too much fuss over it because the DLC will be release months after launch and more importantly Nintendo has proved themselves by supporting the Wii U game with free patches, one that supports more 8 player matches. Even Pokemon, a company that is trying to move away from the shadow of Nintendo, has offered free in game support to their customers post-launch by way of free DLC of legendary pokemons and special/exclusive hidden ability version of their Generation 4 starter set that could be paid DLC under the reigns of a less forgiving game developer.

I wish I could say that is this my welcome back to the Computer playing scene but since all of Evolve and all of it’s DLC is available for PS4 and Xbox One, I guess this is my welcome back to the ‘hard-core gaming world’.

Last weekend I was fortunate enough to have enough free time to finish the last few things that needed to be done in the first Bayonetta game before I could properly dig my teeth into the sequel, the game I wanted to play since the end of October.

My normal schedule would only allow me to play late at night, after work but I found the time to sit down and play through the game for a solid few hours this Sunday afternoon and evening

A lot of things can be said, and already had been said about Platinum’s Bayonetta, both the game and the character, so much so that I would not be surprised that if in the next few years we see feminist and gaming books hit the shelves that focuses almost exclusively on this one umbra witch. Out of everything I could talk about Bayonetta, for now I want to talk about the image Platinum games had for Bayonetta in their game and how they tried to convey that image in everything outside of the scripted cutscenes.

Thanks to the advancements in technology in gaming almost every game protagonist has personality, moving beyond the 8/16-bit times where there was no room in the game to add any character to the characters. With Platinum, their image of Bayonetta is of this perfect fighter that is always in control of her life and of the situation. The game developers try to bring this point home in every moment in the game, she exudes confidence, you tell that from the way she holds herself and how she talks to friends and how she responds to being in the middle of an ambush from Angels or meeting face-to-face with mammoth skyscraper-sized creatures, that would be an end game boss in any other game.

She is someone that can handle every death defying move without breaking a sweat or sustaining a scratch, as you can see from those causal instant death QTE moments in the cutscenes and in the normal areas of the levels.

The idea of a character’s image is easy to convey in the cutscenes, when the game developers has control of everything, the camera angle down to how Bayonetta move around a room but it during the gameplay where the developers makes the point across in the actual game with the grading system.

In the Bayonetta games, every stage of every level has a grading system to score on how well you performed, with points taken off if you take any damage and if your last fight had a lackluster amount of combo points or if you took too long annihilating everything in the game threw at you. The game even takes off points for when you use items, something that you earn throughout the game, because the Bayonetta that Platinum had in mind is not one who would relay on health packs in the fights.

This is the only game where I felt like I was cheating for using an item that I found naturally in the level.

If you play the game in such a way that you are rewarded with the highest score that game can give you, you start to see that the image of Bayonetta fighting in the cutscene and the way she fights in the game is the same. That being said I am grateful that you can use items in the game and you can sustain damage in your first play through without impeding the story’s development or losing the feeling of epic and scale with the boss fights.

Hello, good day everyone it’s the first post of November and that means another Games from my Backlog update. Last month I more or less took a break from this project with the the idea to just play, “Various Halloween themed games”. My plan was to play these games on my Wednesday Twitch streaming session but I had to change my normal schedule halfway through the month of October.

During that month I did play a handful of supernatural games on Twitch, like replaying They Bleed Pixels, a returning title that I have not played since last year (Be MOP #284), I also played some of Paranautical Activity, an early access game that was pulled from Steam just a few days after I was streaming it. As a surprise to no one I have also been playing through the first Bayonetta game.

It’s Halloween related because of witches right……witches that just happens to use guns than casting magic spells.

This month I want to to get back on track with focusing on a few select games rather than a genera. For the month of November I was to focus getting through Bayonetta 1, a game I have already been playing through every non-streaming day with the hopes to complete it so I can start playing through the sequel before December comes around.

The other game I have been itching to play is the soon to be released, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. I know I need to play through it 100% anyway, it is best to dedicate a month of game play to it now so the temptation to play it does not eat into any other games.

I hope there’s more lore and more endgame levels in this remake.

I know it is cheating choosing Bayonetta and The Binding of Isaac for my pick from the Backlog, since they are fresh of the release shelves but now they are in my library and to an extent my backlog, so it is almost justified. Who knows I might be doing the same thing for Pokemon ORAS.

**Monthly announcements**

Just like last month I have some announcements that I want you all to be aware of but they are not big enough to dedicate a full blog post to what I need to talk about.

First announcement, As I mentioned before I am changing my Twitch streaming schedule. At the start of the month I received an email from Turbine asking me, that since I was already apart of their Streamer Partnership Program (you can read more about it and what it means here: Be MOP #419), if I wanted to stream on Infinite Crisis’s main Twitch channel every Thursday morning.

I gladly accepted but because of that I am forcing myself to drop my late night streaming session on Wednesdays so I can get a full night sleep, and more importantly I do not sleep through my morning streaming time. And because of a change in my work schedule, I am bumping my Saturday starting time back an half hour from 11 pm to 11:30 pm and as a result I am pushing back the end time to 2:30 pm, so it becomes just like my Monday and Friday stream times.

The second thing I wanted to mention that this Tuesday the United States is having their Midterm elections and I encourage all registered voters who are reading this to go out and vote. I do not care which political party you side with or what politician you are planning to vote for, the important thing is to go out, get educated on your local and state issues and stances of your Representatives and cast your vote this Tuesday.To everyone else out there, vote now and vote often because frequent voting builds a better character and builds a better nation.

Yesterday I finally got around to receiving my slightly belated Birthday gift, Bayonetta 2 and because of the benevolence of Nintendo, along with the sequel I received a physical copy of the first game in the standard edition. Since I am new to the series I have spent most of my free time yesterday playing through Bayonetta 1 before I even touch the shiny new next-gen follow up game.

I have gotten to the point in the game where it introduce the ,lack for a better word, causal insta-kill scenarios into the regular part of the game

Depending on how well I take to these games I might continue the Platinum hype train with buying their earlier Wii U game, the Wonderful 101.

Besides game play Bayonetta is an interesting topic because there is so much one could talk and speculate about. I could go into an full post about how this is one of Nintendo’s first mature rated first party game since Conker’s Bad Fur Day or how it was Nintendo’s choice to allow some of their greatest female characters like Peach, Daisy, and Samus to be cosmetic costumes for Bayonetta, and even pushing the creators to make the costumes even more sexier and what it means for the future of Nintendo and their Family Friendly status that they have been building up for the past few decades.

What a time to be alive. My favorite thing is how the Mii-verse is handling a game with such unapologetic sex appeal and swearing.

These are all good topics that I might return to later, once we have more evidence to suggest that this is a new trend for Nintendo, rather than magnificent lighting in a bottle event. Instead I want to shine light in the fact that Bayonetta 2 kicks off what I am calling, and what I have written about before (Be MOP #440), Nintendo Domination Month. I have been waiting for this event for a very long time because within this one month period all of my most anticipated games for 2014, most of them just so happens to be Nintendo IPs, will hit the shelves.

The arrival of Bayonetta 1 and 2 on the Wii U kicked off the season followed by the remake of one of my favorite game, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, the only PC game on this list, but from what we saw the advancement of Bayonetta, it could be on the eShop catalog one day. Then sometime in November we will be receiving the first half of Mario Kart 8 DLC, with the introduction of new characters, vehicles and new tracks.

After THAT we finally see the Gen 3DS remake, Pokemon Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire and long awaited Super Smash Bros. for the Wii U released on the same day. All of these games are coming out within four weeks and all of these games are titles I am beyond pumped to buy them all, which is great because recently I have been using my Wii U’s Amazon streaming app more than playing games on it, which is a serious sign that I needed to improve my console’s library.

I will be talking about Smash, the DLC, and my thoughts very soon.

Pardon me if for the next month or two I will be focusing mostly on Nintendo’s practice and games, this is the first time in quite a while that I have been excited for the release of any one game, let alone six of them. Heaven only knows how I will be able to juggle my free time between all these games.

It was another weekend and another weekend has come and gone and with that I spent my free time playing Super Mario 3D World, Mario Kart 8 online play, and more of Pokemon White. But one new game I was playing the Demo of the Wii U exclusive, Bayonetta 2. consider it warming up my Wii U for some amazing titles come this holiday season.

I have played through the demo of the game twice, and even though it is just the prologue but it is full of constant, no context, combat. Right out the gate the game asks me to fight off waves of angelic mechas and monsters on a jet plane which speeding through a main square of a city. After you think it’s done, the demo leads you to the giant King Kong style boss fight where you fly around fighting a giant monster as it climbs up a skyscraper.

The game makes the promise of continuing that level of intensity throughout the entire game and after playing through the demo twice I realized that the kicker of the demo is that the entire sequence is only the prologue of the main game, meaning I played a part of the game that is not even in the main game and combat.

I am literally counting down the days

The game demo is not the only reason I am excited for this game, because if you have been paying attention I have been casually mentioning this game, Pokemon ORAS, and Super Smash Bros as a few games on a very short list of games I am eagerly waiting to be released for this upcoming holiday season.

One of the reasons why I want this game is that since I played the Deadpool game I have been waiting for another fun near mindless beat em up game that was also entertaining to play through, while I only scored bronze medals and a few silvers one the different stages in the demo there is the option for me to improve my combo mashing skills while not impeding my advancement through the game. Bayonetta 2 is also an excuse to boot up my Wii U for another game, my poor console has been sitting in my room, waiting for a new game to play, since my initial games I bought with the device from a few months ago.

But the biggest reasons I can not wait for, well lack of a better words, the fan service that Platinum Games has added to Bayonetta 2. While I have been trying hard to avoid any spoilers to the main plot I been going actively looking for all the Nintendo inspired Easter eggs added to this game. The most noticeable is the special unlockable Bayonetta costumes inspired by some of Nintendo’s characters, that offers different play styles or by using the classic sound files from Zelda and Mario games.

Metroid for the Wii U confirmed?

As I said in Be MOP #392 I love it when the game developers adds those little things like this into their game because it shows that they are confident or the game is polished enough to allow the creation, design, programming, and implication of these nonessential bit ans trivial content and nods to the player into the game

Also I won’t be so above it all to say I really want to play through Bayonetta 2 because it is a Wii U exclusive. Because of Nintendo’s decision to fund Platinum Games for a sequel, this experience denying it to all other gamers. It is childish but I call it the annoying brother syndrome, wanting something because you know others can’t get it.

This is a first time I get to play a third party exclusive mature console specific game with no hopes of a cross platform port. This is a new feeling for me.